Mom and Dad
My parents taught me two things I have never been able to separate from each other, no matter how many years I've spent trying to understand either one on its own.
My father taught me what honesty means. My mother taught me what it means to stand up — not just for yourself, but for someone else.
I was five or six years old. My father was working to become a stockbroker, reading the Wall Street Journal at the kitchen table. There was a cartoon at the bottom of one of the pages — a small frame, maybe two inches high — showing a boy standing on one of those old spring-loaded penny scales. The kind that printed your weight and your fortune on a little card. The card in the cartoon said: you were adopted.
I asked my father what that meant.
He put down the paper and told me. All of it. What adopted meant. That it was true — that he and my mother had wanted children, had been told they couldn't have them, and had gone out and found me. Those were his words, or close enough in my recollection. Three years later they began adoption proceedings again and my mother turned up pregnant with my sister. Three years after that, because everyone told them it was a fluke that couldn't happen twice, they started the process again — and she turned up pregnant with my brother.
My father didn't know when he might have told me any of this on his own. I don't know either. But a cartoon at the bottom of a newspaper page asked the question for him, and he answered it completely, honestly, and without flinching, to a five-year-old who had no framework yet for what he was being told.
That is what honesty looks like. Not the absence of difficulty. The refusal to hide from it.
My father and I were in a personality conflict from the time I was born until the day he died. I want to say that plainly, because softening it would be its own kind of dishonesty. We clashed. Persistently, sometimes painfully, across decades. And I have never — not once — doubted that he loved me. That my best interests were his concern. We just clashed. That is one of the sadder true things I know about my own life.
But it does not change what he taught me.
My mother was five feet tall. Hold that while I tell you the next part.
I was about fifteen, suspended from school — at a time when a suspension could mean six months in juvenile hall, which gives you a sense of the era. My mother came with me to a meeting with a vice principal and the teacher who had suspended me. She had us there fifteen minutes early.
When the vice principal came in, he went straight to the counter — no more than six feet from where we were sitting — and struck up a conversation with someone I didn't recognize. Our appointment time came and went. He finished, went into his office. The teacher arrived around the time we should have been called in. They went in. Five to ten minutes later, we were.
I watched my mother's face during all of that. I had seen her angry with me enough times to recognize it. But somewhere in those minutes, while he stood six feet away and talked about nothing that concerned us, the anger shifted. It was no longer pointed at me.
I didn't fully understand that yet. I would understand it shortly.
When the teacher began reviewing my record, she reached back into the previous year's difficulties. I said, as politely as I could, that I thought those were from last year — that this year things had changed. The vice principal looked at me and told me not to talk to his teacher in that tone of voice.
My mother stood up. Five feet tall. She leaned across the front of his desk, put her finger in his face, and told him not to talk to her son that way. That I was being polite. That the teacher was presenting inaccurate information.
She did not raise her voice. She didn't need to.
He had earned that from her.
The suspension was rescinded. I returned to school the next day.
She walked me out to the car. I had just gotten my learner's permit, and all I could think was that I was still in enormous trouble when we got home. She looked at me and asked if I wanted to drive. I said yes. She slid the keys across the roof of the car and said: we showed that son of a bitch, didn't we?
Tell the truth. Stand up. Don't let the size of the room — or the person across the desk — change either one of those things.
I am still working on it.
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